Lydia Davis is Awesome

As a writer, anyway. I haven't met her in person, so maybe she's not super-awesome. After reading that lug 1Q84 I definitely wanted to follow up with some lighter reading, but with my copies of the Hunger Games trilogy back at my parents' house, and a collection of Lydia Davis short stories on my shelf, I decided to read me some short stories. And a lot of them were short: like, really short. Like, one sentence. So I couldn't really quote them in case I get chased down for reprinting without permission. At least in this  particular collection, Varieties of Disturbance.

Aw, fuck it. Here's one of her miniscule gems in its entirety:"Collaboration With a Fly"

"I put that word on the page,
but he added the apostrophe."

The collection contains 57 stories, most of them really, really short. The topics range from the ritual of TV watching, explaining sex to children, caterpillars, babies, and the relationships between friends. Sure, sounds banal, but the stories aren't your typical stories: most of the characters are not named, their focus is somewhat single-minded (on the topic at hand), and there is hardly any scene or dialogue (if any, just one).  Some, like the one above, even have line breaks, like poems. Davis certainly blends the two in cool ways: and not just as punchlines.

Some of them go on for several pages, though, resembling more typical stories, though not quite. "We Miss You" is a lengthy "analysis" of letters written in a fourth-grade class sometime in the fifties or sixties, written to a classmate who was in the hospital. The narrator picks apart these grammar-school exercises in formal writing quite thoroughly, noting the specific phrases and instances of complex sentence structure in each of the letters. Another story, which is much longer, "Helen and Vi," is a report of three women who have lived to be quite old--and the third, Hope, who defies the conventional notions of what it takes to stay healthy and live long, is mentioned peripherally.

Some of the stories are so abstract, terse, and just plain short, I question whether Davis even edited some of these stories, and just submitted them after jotting them down thanks to some inspired train of thought. It certainly puts the idea that writers are supposed to slave and suffer over their drafts into question: sure, you can agonize over perfecting a single sentence, but how much agonizing can you do when that's all the story is? Of course, I don't really know if Davis slaved over her writing or not.

The shortness of many of her short stories/prose-poems also enable re-readability: something that busy poeple such as myself do not really have time to waste with. This increased my enjoyment of the stories as I could easily read them again. And on some occasions, I dwelled on a story for much longer than the time it took for me to read it. Whether the short ones are hit-or-miss, they certainly require thinking about the relationship of the title to the sentence, which is not always apparent.

Lydia Davis's style is reminiscent of David Foster Wallace, with clever and absurd turns of phrase accompanying the ennui and hopelessness of everyday life, in addition to reality-bending realism. However, Davis is much more abstract and much less concerned about details than Wallace was; in fact, a lot of her stories are quite anti-Wallace, the prose vague and bare and conceptual (rather than meticulously detailed and concrete); thus her stories average only a few pages, while Wallace's go into the double digits. Her stories address storytelling and other meta-narratives in much a similar manner, in much less space; so it made me think why I had never heard of her before? Is it because she writes fiction/prose-poetry and not essays too? Because she wasn't in journalism? Because she's a woman? Of course, Wallace is still one of my favorite authors, but I think Lydia deserves some love too.

The short, terse style of Lydia Davis's stories are the real future of American short fiction, which is currently oversaturated with tedious depictions of everyday life for a specific (often based on a real person) character as they go through a change (usually aging or death). Writers: you've learned what the rules are; if you want to know how to shatter them completely, Lydia Davis is a must-read writer for you.*

A rare 5 out of 5 stars for this one. (Not perfect, but I'm grading on a curve here)

*I am basing this after reading just one collection, so I could be incorrect in saying that Lydia Davis eats nails instead of bran for breakfast, if you know what I mean.